Musings of a Software Development Manager

Everyone has that trunk of old junk tucked away in the attic. It’s almost spring and time to think about getting organized, tossing out old junk, and having a garage sale. Apache has managed to create an online concept of a software attic. Old open source projects that have outlived there useful [...]

The image above probably needs a bit of explanation. After having a lingering todo I finally made a donation and requested a Green Clean Code band from Uncle Bob Martin. I was at a talk of his at SD West 2005. At that point he pointed out a rubber band he was [...]

Michael Feathers wrote a tough post recently on UI testing tools.
The fact of the matter is that UI based testing should be used for UIs: that’s it. You should not be testing your full application end-to-end through a UI Testing tool. First of all, that sort of testing couples some of the most important tests [...]

I came across a note of mine from last year on my baseline expectations for developers:

All code is checked into source control on an hourly basis or at most daily.
Every project has an automated build. (Maven, Ant)
All projects are setup in continuous integration (Hudson)
All code follows the current Java/Groovy coding standards.
Unit test coverage of [...]

According to a Forester report the multiple IDEs for Java developers is standard practice:
While Eclipse is common, it won’t become the only Java IDE in enterprise IT shops any time soon. Less than one out of five Java developers have a single primary Java IDE and no other.
– Jeffery S. Hammond (Forrester Research)
IDE Usage Trends
As [...]

Not too long ago a local recruiter noted at a JUG meeting:
“I don’t care what else you have on your resume, but you have to have Spring and Hibernate. I know it was all EJB and SOA just a few years ago, but now if you don’t have Spring/Hibernate you’re not getting past [...]

I know you wonder why developers come charging into the help desk right after you’ve delivered the sparkling new machine with 8GB of RAM, dual monitors and a quad core processor. They start babbling about how they need admin access or you might as well give them there old Pentium 4 box so they [...]

It’s almost 2010 and JUnit runners are still an optional download for Oracle JDeveloper 11g. JDeveloper is a reasonable IDE and it’s improved over the years. It has most of the basic features an Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA user would expect including plenty of refactoring support.
Leaving out JUnit integration was unfortunate. My [...]

A common pattern when going through labs for various java classes is the pattern of building some main() method, performing a number of operations and spitting out a bunch of System.out.println()s. It’s an easy way to get feedback and avoid having to start with much context. Unfortunately it’s really a procedural style and requires [...]

Hudson has a Continuous Integration Plugin game that gives you points for successful builds, adding tests, removing TODOs, etc. As a plugin it started out simple, but now allows you to get points based on:

Doing a successful build.
Adding new successful tests.
Fixing PMD, FindBugs, or Checkstyle warnings.
Fixing a compiler warning.
Fixing a TODO.

Around a year ago [...]